New Books in History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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8551
William S. Kiser, “Borderlands of Slavery: The ...
In recent years, historians have reevaluated the role of unfree labor in the nineteenth century American West. William S. Kiser, an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University – San Antonio, is part of this historiographical movement.
50 min
8552
Katherine Benton-Cohen, “Inventing the Immigrat...
In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fan...
66 min
8553
Ian Rocksborough-Smith, “Black Public History i...
Activism comes in many forms, be it political, educational, or social. Less often though, do people perceive historical activism in such conversations. Dr. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s new book: Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism From W...
64 min
8554
Jeffrey Dudas, “Raised Right: Fatherhood in Mod...
With the rise of President Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party, once a Democrat and liberal on many social issues, what does it mean to be a conservative today? What is the glue that connects Trump to other figures and ideas central to the...
24 min
8555
Joëlle Gergis, “Sunburnt Country: The History a...
In her new book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the University of Melbourne, explores the long history of Australia’s climat...
14 min
8556
Katherine McGregor et al, “The Indonesian Genoc...
I don’t often start these blog posts with comments about the cover art. But the reproduction of Alit Ambara’s “After 1965,” featured on the cover of the new set of essays The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes,
36 min
8557
Kelley Fanto Deetz, “Bound to the Fire: How Vir...
The concept of “Southern hospitality” began to take form in the late eighteenth century and became especially associated with Virginia’s grand plantations. This state was home to many of our founding fathers. Their galas, balls, feasts,
47 min
8558
Tameka Bradley Hobbs, “Democracy Abroad, Lynchi...
The World War II era was a transformative period for the United States’ relationship to the rest of the world. Exporting liberal democracy was an important goal for the American government. Yet in places like Florida,
71 min
8559
Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Indigenous Prosperity and...
Historians have gotten the story of the colonial Ohio River Valley all wrong, argues Susan Sleeper-Smith in Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Omonundro Institute and the University of North C...
48 min
8560
Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen: A History of Pri...
To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book,
41 min
8561
Richard Ivan Jobs, “Backpack Ambassadors: How Y...
Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of t...
57 min
8562
Heather Curtis, “Holy Humanitarians: American E...
The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the outside world at various moments in U.S. history,
56 min
8563
Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creat...
Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritual practitioners in the Caribbean claimed knowledge abou...
51 min
8564
Mirjam Zadoff, “Werner Scholem: A German Life” ...
In Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of an individual, a family chronicle,
27 min
8565
Victor Bulmer‑Thomas, “Empire in Retreat: The P...
A respected authority on 19th- and 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean History as well as a past Director at Chatham House, Victor Bulmer‑Thomas, CMG, OBE provides the reader with a most unusual survey and view of the United States as an ‘empire’...
41 min
8566
Steven and Ben Nadler, “Heretics!: The Wondrous...
This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excommunication, prison,
67 min
8567
John Bushnell, “Russian Peasant Women Who Refus...
In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with ...
72 min
8568
John Mackay, “The Bonanza King: John Mackay and...
John Mackay’s life began humbly, immigrating as a child from an impoverished Irish household to New York City where he worked selling newspapers in the streets. Within four decades, he was a stakeholder in one of the wealthiest precious metal strikes i...
62 min
8569
Ata Anzali, “‘Mysticism’ in Iran: The Safavid R...
In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of...
49 min
8570
Konrad Jarausch, “Broken Lives: How Ordinary Ge...
In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
52 min
8571
Clayton Nall, “The Road to Inequality: How the ...
Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep divides between the parties have an obvious geographic d...
27 min
8572
Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of ...
Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity,
42 min
8573
Eliyahu Stern, “Jewish Materialism: The Intelle...
Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish hi...
52 min
8574
Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagora...
Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connection is, and how both math and music connect to both phy...
54 min
8575
Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Comanche Empire” (Yale U...
In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West.
53 min